Jess Andrade: The Brownie Club

Work in Development

This is an autobiographical aerial theatre piece of Jessica Andrade a British Indian girl growing up in white conservative Essex. The scene is set in a catholic Primary School in the 90’s when Jessica starts the club as she is too busy doing gymnastics three times a week so she can’t join ‘Brownies/girl guides’ so she decides to start her own club with her two besties. She invites us into her ‘Brownie Club’ consisting of her two friends Clever Rachel and Crazy Christina.

The threesome start to set up their club in their tree house which is made up of three sets of aerial silks, they each have one as their own cocoon. They share stories, gossip and tales of the playground and classroom. We start to see why they have bonded so much as they feel isolated and different from the rest of their class mates. These comedic real life experiences and encounters are based on stereotypes that have been thrown at them because of the colour of their skin. Ethnically they are all from different backgrounds; Jessica’s parents are from Goa, Clever Rachels Dad is from the Caribbean and Crazy Christinas mum is from Mauritius.

Throughout the play we see the girls grow up and The Brownie Club stay strong in the metaphorical sense as they continue with humorous stories of how they try to fit in during higher learning and work life.
The work will consist of a lot of gesture work and movement with voice overs and music with direction from Frantic Assembly's Krista Vuori.

Current state of project

Associate artist at Upswing.
I created this piece as a solo, and performed a 15 min excerpt at Tilt festival 2016 and British Asian festival in Watford January 2016.
I have gathered support from Tara Arts and Proteus Theatre. Proteus have discussed R&D space in May,Tara have discussed a showing in July. As this is a busy time and artists are getting booked for work I would like to push it back to R&D in October for a performance in Nov/Dec.